TTArtisan 50mm F0.95 Camera Lens Full Fame Manual Focus Lens Compatible with Leica M Mount Camera Leica M-M M240 M3 M6 M7 M8 M9 M9p M10 (Black version)

Product Information

All samples have been shot on my Fujifilm X-pro3 cameras. I have shot this lens at night as well as in daylight, I have tried to shoot both portraiture and more street oriented images. All images have been post processed using Adobe Lightroom software.

At half-body portrait distance the differences are not that big. But if you focus on something farther away the Zhong Yi pulls ahead when it comes to sharpness and bokeh. The TTArtisan 50mm 0.95 was kindly provided free of charge by TTArtisan for reviewing purpose for a duration of 4 weeks. f/0.95 It exhibits a little bit of optical vignetting, so you can get a bit of swirl at the right distances, and the shape of the Christmas…sorry…bokeh balls will look a bit more cat-eyed towards the edges of the frames. So let me write a little bit about the TTartisan 50mm f/1.2 on it own terms, listing its strengths and weaknesses. Then I’ll leave the comparisons out of the equation for now. Build and feelIt is recommended to have a look at this article first to get an idea how this brightness graph works. All these filters are just as sharp and take the same pictures, the difference is how much abuse they'll take and stay clean and stay in one piece. Bokeh, the feel, character or quality of out-of-focus areas as opposed to how far out of focus they are, is very good. That's the whole point of this lens. I ended up speaking to Hamish about this, as I know he has also tried this lens on his M10. He confirmed that he too found close focusing with the TTArtisan 50mm f/0.95 to be an issue when shooting wide open. I asked him to comment for the benefit of this review:

I missed focus here but I thought the shot was kind of cool with the lighting and shadows. This was taken using f0.95 and 160 ISO. Why am I telling you all this? Because at times I wish all lenses had the chance to be user-calibrated like the TTArtisan 50mm 0.95 and its siblings do!They do cut some corners perhaps. There have been some quality control issues reported online (see the Focus Shift blog linked in the article), they don’t calibrate their lenses, and the focusing mechanism is not the most precise (or expensive). Aside from that I see no reason to question its quality. A magnifier eyepiece will help you focusing a lot. Otherwise, I do recommend using an EVF to be sure you are spot on. Even Leica admit the rangefinder mechanisms have its own limitations for really fast lenses. It is written in the Noctilux user guide that there might be errors wide open. You can then assume you will do errors wide open with this lens too. So beat it and learn to use it.